Field of Dreams (Dubuque County, Iowa)

Where it sits. The field lies on Lansing Road, about three miles northeast of Dyersville in Dubuque County, in the rolling farm country of northeastern Iowa where the last glaciers never flattened the land. The approach is the whole experience: a gravel county road climbing between corn rows, a mailbox, then a white clapboard farmhouse on a knoll with a wooden bleacher, a backstop, and a manicured baseball diamond cut into the crop. Beyond the outfield the corn simply resumes. There is no fence, no ticket booth and no gate. Dyersville itself is twenty-five miles west of Dubuque and the Mississippi, and the surrounding townships are dairy and row-crop country settled largely by German Catholic families in the nineteenth century.

The story behind it. The farmhouse was built in 1906 for the Lansing family, who worked the land for three generations. In 1988 a location scout for Universal Pictures found the property while searching for a farm whose house, slope and horizon would all work in a single frame. The production built the diamond that spring, laid sod, installed lights and irrigated the surrounding corn through a drought summer to get it tall enough to swallow a walking man. The film, Field of Dreams, directed by Phil Alden Robinson and adapted from W. P. Kinsella's 1982 novel Shoeless Joe, was released in April 1989 and earned three Academy Award nominations including Best Picture.

A field split down the middle. The diamond straddled a property line, which produced one of the odder chapters in American tourism. The house, the infield and right field belonged to Don and Becky Lansing; left and centre field belonged to the neighbouring Ameskamp family, who initially ploughed their share back into corn after filming, then restored it when visitors kept arriving. For roughly two decades two separate operations, two gift stands and two sets of rules governed one baseball field, and visitors crossing from shortstop to left field were technically changing businesses. Both parcels were finally bought and reunited under a single owner in 2011 and 2012.

What the film left behind. The site is unusually faithful to what was shot, because so little was built. The house is the real house, restored and open for tours; the porch swing, the kitchen and the upstairs bedroom are recognisable from the picture. The bleacher along the first-base line is the original three-row wooden structure. The lights are the film's lights. Visitors are free to walk onto the grass, bat, pitch, run the bases and disappear into the corn behind centre field, which is exactly what most people do. Two lines of dialogue drive nearly every conversation held here: the whispered instruction that Ray Kinsella hears, correctly quoted as "If you build it, he will come" rather than the near-universal misquotation with "they", and the exchange at the plate — "Is this heaven?" "No, it's Iowa."

Major League Baseball comes to the corn. In August 2021 Major League Baseball built a temporary 8,000-seat ballpark in an adjacent cornfield, its outfield wall pierced by gates cut into the crop, and staged a regular-season game between the Chicago White Sox and the New York Yankees. Kevin Costner led both teams out of the corn before first pitch; the White Sox won 9-8 on a two-run walk-off home run by Tim Anderson that landed in the standing corn beyond right field. The Chicago Cubs and Cincinnati Reds played the follow-up in August 2022. The temporary stadium sat separately from the movie diamond, which remained intact throughout, and the site has since been developing a larger year-round baseball complex on the surrounding acres.

Getting there and timing. Dyersville is reached from US 20, roughly a four-hour drive from Chicago and ninety minutes from Cedar Rapids; the field is signposted from town. Admission to the movie site and its grounds is free, and the field is open daily from dawn to dusk between roughly April and November, with the house tours, the shop and the food stand running shorter seasons. The corn is planted in May, reaches shoulder height by early July and towers by August, so the classic photograph needs a late-summer visit; by November the stalks are cut and the horizon opens up. Sunset from behind home plate, with the lights coming on over the corn, is the picture worth waiting for. Dyersville is also worth an hour for the Basilica of St. Francis Xavier, whose twin spires rise over 200 feet above a town of 4,000, and for the National Farm Toy Museum. The playing surface is mown grass and the parking is gravel, which makes wheelchair access workable but bumpy.